Four years later, Facebook votes disappear for good

Shark attacks, plane crashes are only slightly less likely than a user's vote.

Facebook’s last user vote has closed, once again with a minuscule turnout compared to the size of the social network in general according to its site governance page. Only 668,872 votes were cast out of the billion active users for a turnout of 0.067 percent. Facebook is now free to enact its new privacy policies without concern for the vote results. The new policy will, among other things, remove the user vote as a necessary step in policy changes.

Facebook instituted a rule that would push any policy changes that received more than 7,000 comments to a sitewide vote back in April 2009, nearly four years ago. The most recent version of the company’s statement of rights and responsibilities as well as the data use policy remove the need for that step. It also frees Facebook from having to keep data stored in the US and Europe separate. Likewise, Facebook will no longer have to store its Instagram data separately.

An overwhelming percentage of users voted against the policy changes: 88 percent, or 589,141 votes. But at only 0.067 percent of Facebook’s populace, the turnout is nowhere near the required 30 percent to make the results binding.

Between the three votes, Facebook Nation has a paltry average turnout of 0.145 percent. Most of that weight comes from the inaugural vote that instituted the voting policy and was heavily publicized by Facebook itself (the second vote had the worst turnout, at 0.038 percent). You're more likely to have been abducted by aliens than have ever voted in Facebook poll, according to this extremely dubious website. The results are still subject to an outside audit, but provided there aren’t some 299 million digital ballots stuffed in a virtual closet, user votes at Facebook are over for good. Worst democracy ever? Maybe.

Promoted Comments

I must admit, I went to vote but did not. I looked at the voting site and the policy I was voting on and found it much too much to understand. I hate voting on things I don't personally understand, so I skipped it.

IMO, nothing is changing here. Nothing that complex was going to get a 30% vote. The only way they'd get a 30% turnout is if they made the ballot 2 simple sentences and put it at the top of your feed until you voted. So they were never going to be bound to it anyway.

558 posts | registered Dec 21, 2011

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston